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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Broken_Clock who wrote (56244)	3/26/2006 9:46:38 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 110194

Who was talking about food? I said goods. Everyone expects households to change their buying habits over time as they age but one can make a fairly accurate assessment of the change in living standards over time by comparing households in the same age/income bracket from one period to the next. Measuring inflation by using a basket of goods is inaccurate for all the reasons Mish has elaborated repeatedly on this thread. Measuring hourly wages is actually quite accurate since in some fields the work hasn't changed much at all. If hourly wages were being eaten away by inflation as much as some economists claim, lagging the official CPI, then we'd see a marked decline in living standards across a broad swath of income groups. One only has to look at the sheer number of goods and services that American families buy on a regular basis that they didn't have available or couldn't afford back in the 50s,60s,70s, etc to see that living standards are up over any ten year period you want to measure. You can use about any per capita measure you want, TVs per capita, square footage per capita, washing machines per capita, books per capita, education per capita, phones per capita, computers per capita, etc. and it is all up across the board. Food, which was a very large percentage of the household budget for a median family of four back in 1950s, has shrunk percentagewise making room for all the other things that a household spends their money on.